By Bob Braun/Star-Ledger Columnist
New Jersey deserves better. Today, the embarrassing political assault on one of the state’s few symbols of excellence — Rutgers University — reaches a turning point. The state Senate will vote to dismember Rutgers. Next week, the Assembly is likely to agree. Gov. Chris Christie. He will call it “higher education reform.”
The Senate vote today follows two Senate committee hearings. At one, the Senate higher education committee, Democrats and Republicans voted to take away Rutgers’ Camden campus. It’s what Christie’s ally, South Jersey political boss George Norcross, wants. The committee voted despite not having a clue what it will cost. And it may cost a half-billion dollars, according to members of the Rutgers trustee board. At that hearing, Sen. Donald Norcross (D-Camden), George’s younger brother, promised he would have the cost of the merger “in a few days, by Monday.”
Trust me, he said. The legislators, lemming-like, believed his promise. It’s good for their careers to believe a man named Norcross.
But, then, on Monday, Norcross the younger didn’t have the numbers for the Senate Budget Committee. Oh, well. No matter. That committee, charged with the fiduciary duty over taxpayer’s money, also voted for the “reform” plan.
Let’s get this straight. The same Legislature that reduced pension and medical benefits to public employees is about to give the Christie administration and George Norcross a blank check to spend millions of dollars on, among other things, paying off bondholders who paid for higher education construction in Camden.
But, in a way, that’s not the worst of it. Money is just money. How about pride and decency and doing the right thing?
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